A playwright, a director, an artistic director and an actor share their experiences — and prescriptions for change.
What has been the impact of race, and racism, on African-Americans working in the theater world? How should that world change? Those questions have taken on renewed, impassioned life since the killing of George Floyd, the shooting deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, and the nationwide protests over racial injustice that have followed.
This week the Broadway Advocacy Coalition is holding a forum on racism in the industry. We asked four African-American theater figures — based in different parts of the country and in different corners of the business — to share their first-person accounts. Here are their edited responses.
THE PLAYWRIGHT: Lydia r. diamond
‘Until you show me institutional change, I don’t want to hear it’
My experiences of the theatre are no different from my experiences of the world at large, which is that it’s very difficult to navigate in a racist and sexist world. Sometimes I think that theatre thinks it’s somehow immune to being complicit in the intrinsic racism of our world. What I’ve seen over the course of my career is institutional racism and sexism at every level of the American theater. And that saddens me.
I hear so often from white men in the theater, “Oh, we don’t know what to do because all of the black people get the opportunities.” But you have only to look at the numbers. And it’s shocking.
Every second of every moment of my career is touched by some degree of a kind of racism that is just pervasive in the landscape of America. This moment, where the world is blowing up, comes out of a pent-up frustration about the way we as people of color have been navigating the world. It is frustrating to me and, I will presumptuously say, most other African-Americans or people of colour in my industry.
Oh my God, I’ll say this and then never have another Broadway production. But I think this is the time to speak truth. Everywhere there’s this racism and a lack of opportunity, and we know that the Great White Way is even more so. It’s a world that has been run by white men, and it’s a world that has high, stakes. The higher the economic opportunities in our country, the more black people are denied access. Period.
The Director: Kenny leon
‘I’m not giving up on Broadway. I’m not giving up on America’
Many of us have been pushing toward this moment. Of course all lives matter, but that’s not what I’m talking about. We’re talking about the black house on a street in a line of houses, and that black house is on fire, and has been on fire for 400 years, and needs our considered attention, resources and intervention to put that fire out. I mean the fire of racial injustice.
The message I want to say to my black brothers and sisters, whose heritage is rooted in racial injustice and who have been on the front lines of this struggle for 400 years, from my great-great grandfather, to my great-grandfather, my grandmother, my mother, but also people like Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee and the work of the Negro Ensemble Company and New Federal Theater: I want to honor their commitment.
To my white friends and colleagues: I want their help to create a more just world. My experiences have led me to know that if white citizens were honest with themselves, they can remember incidents where moments of racism entered into the atmosphere and they didn’t say anything about it.
Sometimes it could have been on the golf course, it could have been in a rehearsal hall, it could have been a corporate meeting. But now, when we have the ears of the world, there has to be a discussion, a dialogue. And especially for Broadway, it has to be a dialogue and it can no longer be one way. There hasn’t been enough listening with my well-intentioned white friends.
There needs to be more diversity in the theatre. There needs to be more diversity of storytelling. Money should not always lead the discussion. We need different voices at all of the tables, and I think we can do that.
The artistic director: Sarah bellamy
‘Black artists who have been wounded: Come on home’
A couple years ago, I wrote a treatment for play that started with a scene in Minneapolis in which a police officer killed a young black man, and then the city started burning. At the time, I was like, “That would never happen in Minneapolis.” I mean, certainly police violence has, but not the city on fire. And now here we are. But I think people are listening. I see people taking care of each other and the community mobilising. That’s not getting reported, but I’m heartened by the ways that people are showing up for each other.
More and more, I think we need to focus deeply on racial healing and attend to the most vulnerable. We’ve known this for some time, but I’m so glad that more folks throughout the country are starting to understand that Minnesota is a crucible of so many deep inequities for black Americans: housing, jobs, health, policing, incarceration and detention, just sector after sector.
I come from a tradition of making art by, for and about black folks, and certainly everyone’s welcome. I was given an opportunity to be loved and to be trusted and to try and test and fail and given cover in a way that I think a lot of other people haven’t. But right now, we’re seeing artists of colour who have been proximate to white-led theaters start to organise.
I haven’t grown up proximate to that whiteness and white power and that leveraging of money, so I haven’t experienced the kind of abuse that these brilliant artists have had in white theaters. And there is a tension, a generative tension, I think, between folks who are kind of embedded within and caring for legacy institutions and those working as free agents.
The actor: Jelani Alladin
‘How do we right this wrong? We come to the table with demands’
The most heartbreaking thing is people keep asking: What is the message? That is by far the most racist question of all. The message is the same it always has been, since the first slave stepped on to the rich soil of this stolen land. SET. US. FREE. That is the message.
The message is, start over the American systems that were made in hopes of keeping black people out of the picture. This includes capitalism, this includes politics, and this includes the Great White Way.
The message is, clear a space at the table, so that we can sit beside you and enjoy the benefits of the seeds our ancestors planted for this now blossoming nation; seeds that for so long, only you, the white privileged, have harvested.
I am 27, just beginning my career as an artist. I have done only one show on Broadway, but I can share with you multiple stories of the racist actions and words that have been flung at me. I simply have no interest in that. Those wounds have healed. I am more interested in preventing the master from ever beating me and my fellow men ever again.